Daur

Daur belongs to the Mongolic branch of Altaic languages and is spoken by a small number of people, approximately 94,014, in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, Heilongjiang, and the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region in the People's Republic of China.

The present monograph begins with an introduction to a brief sociolinguistic background of Daur and its contact situation with neighbouring languages, including the Manchu-Tungusic languages and the Mongolian languages. This is followed by an outline of Daur phonology and a more detailed discussion of Morphology. Daur provides an interesting data to the Morphological studies. It has both complex nominal morphological features and verbal marking systems. In particular, its case marking and verbal marking systems will be presented with an emphasis on their sentence functions and morphological variants. The sketch also includes a brief discussion of the syntactical properties of Daur in relevance to noun phrase and clause structure. Finally, the sketch includes a biblio-graphy of the selected works on Daur and a sample text with interlinear transcription and translation.